Essays in Rebellion eBook

draw parallels between her recurring Voices and the
“tarantism” of the Middle Ages. Superior
people would smile with polite curiosity. The
vulgar would yell in crowds and throw filth in her
face. The scenes of the fifteenth century in
France would be exactly repeated, except that we should
not actually burn her in Trafalgar Square. If
she escaped the madhouse, the gaol and forcible feeding
would be always ready.

So that we must not be hard on that theological conclave
which made the mistake of burning a Blessed One alive.
They were inspired by the highest motives, political
and divine, and they made the fullest use of their
knowledge of spiritual things. Being under divine
direction, they could not allow any weak sentiment
of pity or human consideration to influence their
judgment. Their only error was in their failure
to discern the authenticity of the girl’s miracles,
and we must call that a venial error, since it has
taken the Church nearly five centuries to give a final
decision on the point. The authenticity of miracles!
Of all questions that is the most difficult for a
contemporary to decide. In the case of Joan’s
judges, indeed, the solution of this mystery must
have been almost impossible, unless they were gifted
with prophecy; for most of her miracles were performed
only after her death, or at least only then became
known. And as to the bare facts they knew of her
life—­the realities that everyone might have
seen or heard, and many thousands had shared in—­there
was nothing miraculous about them, nothing to detain
the attention of theologians. They were natural
events.

For a hundred years the country had been rent and
devastated by foreign war. The enemy still clutched
its very centre. The south-west quarter of the
kingdom was his beyond question. By treaty his
young king was heir to the whole. The land was
depopulated by plague and impoverished by vain revolution.
Continuous civil strife tore the people asunder, and
the most powerful of the factions fought for the invader’s
claim. Armies ate up the years like locusts,
and there was no refuge for the poor, no preservation
of wealth for men or honour for women. Even religion
was distracted by schism, divided against herself
into two, perhaps into three, conflicting churches.
In the midst of the misery and tumult this girl appears,
possessed by one thought only—­the pity for
her country. Modest beyond all common decency;
most sensitive to pain, for it always made her cry;
conscious, as she said, that in battle she ran as much
risk of being killed as anyone else, she rode among
men as one of themselves, bareheaded, swinging her
axe, charging with her standard which all must follow,
heartening her countrymen for the cause of France,
striking the invading enemy with the terrors of a spirit.
Just a clear-witted, womanly girl, except that her
cause had driven fear from her heart, and occupied
all her soul, to the exclusion of lesser things.
“Pity she isn’t an Englishwoman!”